Senior Revenue Operations Manager

Overview

You're setting strategy and running projects for a revenue organization selling enterprise LMS software. You own forecasting, compensation design, territory planning, and the GTM tech stack roadmap. You work directly with the CRO, VP Sales, and Finance leadership, and likely manage 1-2 RevOps analysts.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Public company (NASDAQ: DCBO)

Size: 1,019 employees

Growth: Hitting sales records, expanding RevOps team, likely scaling GTM motion

Market Position: Established enterprise LMS player competing against Cornerstone, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday

What This Means: You're optimizing a mature sales org, not building from scratch. There are existing processes, but they're breaking as the company scales. You're modernizing legacy systems and standardizing what grew organically.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• Mixed inbound/outbound motion across Enterprise, Mid-Market segments
• Product-led trial conversions, event pipeline, outbound prospecting
• Partner/channel motion likely exists

Team Structure: Segmented sales org (likely by geography, segment, vertical) with SDRs, AEs, SEs, CSMs

Your Scope: You're setting the rules for how all these teams operate - territories, quotas, comp plans, handoffs, reporting. When something doesn't work, leadership asks you to fix it.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Cornerstone, SAP SuccessFactors, Workday Learning, 360Learning, plus point solutions

Sales Challenges: Long procurement, budget constraints, integration complexity, change management

Why This Matters: Deal complexity means your processes need to handle multi-threaded sales, procurement delays, contract negotiations, and renewals/expansions. Forecasting is hard because deals slip constantly.

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Strategic Projects (30%) | Forecasting/Planning (25%) | Firefighting (20%) | Meetings (15%) | Team Management (10%)

Key Activities

• Forecasting & Planning: Own the weekly/monthly forecast process. You're analyzing pipeline health, identifying risk, and presenting to CRO/CFO. When deals slip or reps sandbag, you're explaining why to the executive team.

• Compensation Design: Build and iterate sales comp plans (quotas, accelerators, SPIFs). You balance rep motivation with company profitability while dealing with reps who game the system and leadership who wants to pay less.

• Territory & Capacity Planning: Design territory models, figure out where to hire next, model sales capacity vs pipeline. This involves messy Excel models with TAM data, conversion rates, and headcount scenarios.

• GTM Tech Stack: Own the roadmap for Salesforce, Outreach, Gong, BI tools, CPQ, etc. You're evaluating vendors, managing implementations, and dealing with integrations that break. Budget is tight, so you're prioritizing ruthlessly.

• Process Optimization: Redesign lead routing, opportunity stages, approval workflows, or forecasting methodology. You write the new process, train the team, and then spend months enforcing it because adoption is always slow.

• Cross-Functional Projects: Work with Finance on revenue recognition, with Legal on contract automation, with Marketing on attribution, with Product on usage data for CSM. Everything takes longer than expected.

• Firefighting: When a big deal is blocked by a system issue, a commission calculation is wrong, or a forecast is off by 20%, you drop everything to fix it. This happens weekly.

• Team Management: If you have 1-2 analysts, you're reviewing their work, unblocking them, and shielding them from some of the chaos. You still do plenty of hands-on work yourself.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're always disappointing someone: Sales wants more leads and higher quotas. Finance wants lower quotas and perfect forecasts. Marketing wants credit for pipeline. You're stuck in the middle making trade-offs.

• Forecast accuracy is your reputation: If you're off by more than 10%, leadership questions every decision you make. But deals slip for reasons outside your control - procurement delays, budget freezes, product bugs. You still own the number.

• Projects take forever: That territory redesign you planned for Q1? It's Q3 and you're still getting buy-in. Sales leadership changes their mind. Finance has new requirements. The tool vendor is delayed. Nothing ships fast.

• Tech stack is a mess: You inherited 10+ tools that barely integrate. Salesforce is customized to hell. Migrating to something better would take a year and $500K. So you band-aid solutions and accumulate technical debt.

• Change management is brutal: You roll out a new process that's objectively better. Half the reps ignore it. You spend months enforcing adoption through reminders, manager pressure, and audit spreadsheets.

• The strategic work gets interrupted: You're trying to design next year's comp plan, but there's an urgent Salesforce bug blocking deals. Strategy work happens nights and weekends.

What Success Looks Like

• Forecast accuracy <5% variance: Your pipeline calls are consistently accurate. Leadership trusts your numbers enough to make hiring and investment decisions.

• Comp plan drives behavior: Reps focus on the right deals (new logo vs expansion, enterprise vs SMB) because the incentives work. Attainment is 60-70% of reps at 80-120% of quota.

• Projects ship: You successfully launch territory realignment, implement CPQ, or overhaul forecasting methodology without breaking the sales motion.

• Tech stack ROI: The tools you implement get adopted and drive efficiency - faster sales cycles, better win rates, lower cost per deal.

• You're in the room: CRO includes you in strategic planning. You're not just executing - you're shaping GTM strategy.

Who You're Working With

Key Stakeholders:

• CRO / VP Sales: Your primary partner - they need accurate forecasts, scalable processes, and data-driven insights
• Finance (CFO, FP&A): They need revenue accuracy, commission validation, and capacity planning alignment
• Marketing (CMO, Ops): Attribution modeling, lead quality, campaign ROI, pipeline contribution
• Sales Managers: Territory assignments, quota fairness, tool training, performance dashboards
• IT/Engineering: System integrations, data pipelines, custom tool builds

What They Care About:

• Revenue Leadership: Can we hit the number? Where are the risks? Should we hire more reps?
• Finance: Will revenue come in as forecasted? Are commissions calculated correctly?
• Sales Managers: Are territories fair? Are my reps set up to succeed?

Requirements

• 5-7+ years in revenue/sales operations, with at least 2 years in strategic roles
• Deep Salesforce expertise - you need to design architecture, not just run reports
• Experience designing compensation plans, territories, and capacity models
• Strong analytical skills - Excel/SQL for modeling, BI tools for visualization
• Track record managing GTM tech stack implementations (CPQ, forecasting, BI tools)
• Ability to influence senior leadership without direct authority
• Experience managing analysts or small teams
• Comfort with ambiguity and constantly shifting priorities
• Thick skin for being in the hot seat when forecasts miss